Two games in "this week's" blog. Or, a game and a beta, depending on how you look at it. I actually tried at least some of three of this month's PS+ games (all the ones on PS4), but two of them were so boring and forgettable that I deleted them very quickly, and I don't think I can even remember their names now. One of them was a racing game with some Level Lord little cars thing going on, and the other had a spaceship moving down tracks? I dunno. It was kinda funny when I was playing the racing one (Table Top Racing?), and thought to myself, "This seems like a Unity game." Then I sat through the credits just to see if there was a Unity logo in there, and there was. So there's that.

Tropico 5.

I did, however, spend some actual time playing Tropico 5. Probably not enough time to write anything super in depth about the mechanics of that game, but enough to write what I want to say about it. Probably like four or five hours? Something in that range.

If you don't know what Tropico is, it's a franchise similar to something like Sim City, where you're in charge of laying out residential buildings, roads, farms, industries, etc. However, unlike Sim City, where you play as some non-existent being with the godlike power of zoning, here you actually create a character, and that character will inhabit the world, and is the one in charge of the goings on.

Also that character is the dictator of a small Caribbean nation.

And that's the hook. It's also the most interesting thing about the game, both mechanically and conceptually. Bear in mind that the game uses "Caribbean dictatorship" as a means of conveying comedy, which, is probably a little problematic. The game does make light of a lot of different regimes that ruled at various points in the Caribbean (and elsewhere in the world), without really acknowledging that many of them were also run by horrible despots responsible for many, many crimes against the people they ruled over. And many deaths.

That said, I do actually think the game is kinda funny and charming. More in the advisors that give you various objectives to complete, and the writing for what they say. It's just goofy and silly, more than anything else. And honestly, given what I do know about the Caribbean, the goofy tone is probably appropriate. I took a couple classes about Caribbean politics in college (which makes me an expert, obviously), and the teacher (raised in Jamaica) did tell us that, in her experience, people in that region of the world try to look on the brighter side, and find humor in things when they can. But again, this is me vaguely remembering something a college professor said in class several years ago.

In the game itself, there's options for things like a sandbox mode, or campaigns. Or, a campaign when you start. And a tutorial, which I failed in my first attempt because I didn't think the game would let me fail an election by not rigging it. And I hadn't saved, so if I wanted the Trophy for finishing the tutorial, I'd have to start from the beginning, and it's not a short tutorial. But, in my rambling, I've gotten ahead of myself again. Let me start where the actual campaign(s) start.

When you first start, you make a dictator, with most of it being purely cosmetic, but there is a trait that does affect game play. Minor stuff like starting with extra money, or getting more efficiency out of certain types of buildings. You can pick gender too, and the game defaulted to a lady (not sure if that was random or not), which was nice. Also not really historically accurate, given that I also vaguely remember there being a lot of sexism in Caribbean governments for a long time (probably still is). But I'm glad the developers chose not to stick to realism in that, and many other ways.

After character creation, you are appointed by the King of England as governor of a small colony in the Caribbean (one of two islands you can pick in the campaign). And as a governor, you only have that position for a few years before you get replaced, so the objective is to build up the island, and gather support for a revolution. At first I thought doing all that in four years was going to be impossible, then I realized it basically is impossible. But you're not really supposed to actually do it in that time frame, because a lot of the rewards for completing objectives are an extension of your term as governor. It's still possible to fail, I assume, but it's not particularly difficult to succeed, at least with the difficulty options set to Medium. There's discreet economy and political difficulty settings, and a setting for how often disasters happen. That one I turned down, because when if I failed, I wanted it to be because of my choices, not because of random chance.

Once you gain enough support to declare independence, that campaign ends, and it starts you with a new one, this time on the other island you could have chosen. It's weird because you're playing the same character, but instead of continuing to rule the country to started, you're governing a different island for the King. There is also a thing going on in the game with a shadowy, La Li Lu Le Lo style secret world ruling power giving you support too. Anyway, you need to build that island up too, with the same time constraints and objectives to extend that. Once you declare independence there, it starts up yet another new campaign, and you pick which of those two islands you want to go to, which is now its own nation. And I think it kept all the stuff I had built up too (I went back to the first one), which was neat.

The goal of that campaign is to survive an invasion from a rival Caribbean power, which you know is coming in X amount of years, and there are tasks you can complete to stall that invasion. Sound familiar? It certainly is, but it ends up being harder than before, for a couple reasons. One is that, as a sovereign nation, the people expect some sort of elections, which I gave them...And I lost. So I reloaded a save, and tried to do things differently...But I lost again. So, I reloaded again, and decided to not even have elections. Which solved my problem of losing elections!

However, it created the problem of people protesting, and eventually trying to rise up and overthrow me. Luckily, in my fear of the invasion coming, I had built up enough guard towers and various defenses that I was able to stop my own people from overthrowing me. Unluckily, by the time the actual invasion happened, most of my defenses had been worn down, and they kinda steamrolled over me. I haven't played since then, but I probably will try to give that campaign another go. Just with the difficulty turned down to see if that actually makes it easier.

I think all of that stuff is interesting, and I really like the idea that you have to try to maintain the happiness of the people in theory, but in practice, I'm not really sure what I was doing wrong. I was definitely building plenty of things to provide food, and other necessities for the people. I was building places for them to live, and stuff like taverns to try to keep them happy. But I couldn't seem to get that happiness rating over the mid 40% range.

What I'm not sure about is if I'm just bad at managing all of this stuff, or if the game is bad at letting me know what's going on. It certainly has many menus (which can be a little confusing to navigate with a controller), and many stats on those menus. Perhaps too many, because instead of looking at them, I opted to just keep building stuff and hope things would get better. I kinda got intimidated the first couple times I looked at some of those menus and didn't want to go back in to try to decipher them. They're probably not even that confusing, but I got impatient. The game is good about giving you objectives to build stuff, but I think those just happen somewhat randomly, rather than the game intelligently saying, "Hey, people don't have enough of X, and if you build X the happiness percent will rise."

Having those sorts of issues can be a little frustrating, but overall I do enjoy the game. I haven't really played anything remotely like this since Age of Empires II (many years ago), which is a pretty different thing (and the RTS combat side of that game meant I didn't play much). I do think it'd be better with a mouse, but I got the game for "free," so I'm not going to complain. I'll keep poking away at it, on easier settings, and maybe report back in the future. I would like to get deeper into the later eras when you have more control over the type of nation you're running. For example, when I got overrun and had to stop (late 1920s, in game), I had just got the ability to research Socialism. I wonder how much stuff like that actually affects the game. We'll see! Maybe!

Overwatch Beta.

As of this writing, the Overwatch Beta is still going on, and there is a part of me that would rather be playing that than writing about it, before it ends. Which is another way of saying that I've had a lot of fun playing Overwatch, because it seems like a really good game. I wasn't at first, it definitely took me a while to really get into it.

Overwatch is, of course, a team based shooter from Blizzard, featuring a wide variety of characters to choose from, all of which play fairly differently from each other. They all have different weapons, and abilities, which range from simple things like Soldier 76's sprint (something everyone else lacks, but more on that later), to more complicated things involving setting traps, healing others, buffing, debuffing, etc. While there's certainly characters that I don't enjoy playing, for one reason or another, a lot of the ones I have tried are pretty fun. I haven't actually tried all of them, and maybe I'll give a few more of them a shot before the beta ends.

Generally speaking, I've been sticking to the more offensively designed characters. I mean that both as in the official "Offensive" characters, and in the more general sense of the word. The game has characters divided into four groups: Offensive, Defensive, Tank, and Support. Offensive characters tend to do a lot of damage, and be more focused on attacking. Defensive are more about setting traps, like Torbjorn the turret forging dwarf or my favorite, Junkrat. Some of them hunker down into one spot from which you do a lot of damage, like Bastion the robot who turns into a turret, or Black Widow, the sniper lady. Tanks are what you expect, they can take a lot of damage, but aren't necessarily the most damaging. I'm fond of Reinhardt, who wields a giant hammer and creates a protective shield in the direction he's looking. And finally Support characters, who are mostly focused on healing, and the aforementioned buffs and debuffs. I have not played much of the Supports.

And there's 21 characters total, I think. You can pick whoever you want, and switch mid game, as many times as you want. There's no limiting your team to one of a specific character. But, the game is really good about recommending what your team should have if it doesn't. If there's no supports, it'll say that. If the team is low in characters that do a lot of damage, it'll say it's a low damage team. Too many of one character, and it'll let you know that too. It's smart, and in my experience, pretty good at letting teams know how to adjust to make it a more well balanced team. Of course, that doesn't always mean it'll be better, or that the people changing their character to fit what the game recommends are making the right choice. It might say that we need a Tank, but if no one on the team is good at playing as a Tank, you might just be better off with an extra Soldier 76 if someone's good with him.

Surprisingly, the game seems pretty well balanced too. Aside from D.Va's mech self destruct skill (the explosion radius is too big!), I haven't seen anything in the game that feels too powerful. But, I played about 7 hours of the beta so far, and I don't really play many games like this, so I don't really know. Maybe there's something in there that's totally broken for reasons I couldn't have imagined! But from what I've played, it's a ton of fun, and like I said, it seems well balanced.

One thing I do take issue with is the combination of the long respawn timer and the time it often takes to get from the spawn point to where the action is. Some of the characters are a bit speedier, but a lot of them feel really slow when you're just slowly trudging across almost the entire map to get to the objective. One of the characters can create a teleporter, which is very useful, but it's just the one character that can do that. If you don't have that character (I forget who it is) on your team, you've just got to hoof it. There is another character that can buff movement speed, but again, it's just the one. I should also say that once you get to where you're going, the movement speeds seem fine, but there can be a lot of downtime in this game, and it's absolutely my biggest issue with it.

Conversely, Junkrat is rad. I think he's my favorite. Just tons of fun to send grenades bouncing all over the place, detonating the remote mine in midair, and trapping people in that bear trap. And the tire! His ultimate skill is a remote controlled tired that just straight up explodes. I've definitely seen people complain about that tire, so maybe that's unbalanced, I don't know. Oh, and you can use that mine to propel yourself into the air! I should do that more often. Though maybe my secret favorite thing about him is that he drops grenades on death, and having that kill someone after they kill me. Well, probably not, because that launcher is rad, but he's fun all around.

Speaking of Junkrat, one thing about the game that seems a little strange is that cast of characters. They seem a little, to be frank, random. Junkrat and Roadhog look like they'd fit better in Mad Max than here. And then there's Winston, who is a talking gorilla. He's the only talking animal in the game. Torbjorn is a cyborg dwarf, and Reinhardt the rather large knight both feel like they were from a cyber fantasy game. McCree is a cyborg Revolver Ocelot, complete with Troy Baker's western drawl. There's certainly a lot of variety in their designs, which is absolutely a good thing, even if a lot of the women characters are either a bit cringe worthy in visual design, or really annoying to listen to (Tracer's bad/fake British and D.Va's, well, everything). The issue is the lack of consistency in them, which just makes the whole thing seem bizarre, especially given that it's set on Earth, and the levels appear to be at, or near real world locations. If only there was some sort of story to tie them all together, and make sense of everything...

As much as I do think Overwatch is a ton of fun, and I've really enjoyed it, the lack of a campaign or story is disappointing. Of course, given Blizzard's track record, and what I saw of a couple of those animated shorts, maybe we're not actually missing much, in terms of narrative. Or, worthwhile narrative. But as someone without a ton of money, $60 for a multiplayer game seems like an iffy proposition. Or, more specifically, $60 for a game that is $40 on another platform with the only differences being a bunch of cosmetic stuff I wouldn't care about, is an iffy proposition.

If you didn't know, Overwatch is available on PC for $40 or $60, but only on consoles for $60. For $40, I could feel good about buying Overwatch. Sixty dollars is a lot of dollars. I don't know if I can afford that, especially with Uncharted 4 out, tomorrow. Maybe I can, it's in a couple weeks. Of course, with there being a couple weeks between the beta and the actual game, could be I change my mind completely and not buy the game at all. Then, by the time the game either goes on sale, or Blizzard decides to offer the $40 version on console, there probably won't be as many people playing, and perhaps not enough to justify buying the game.

I dunno. But, I've had a whole lot of fun in the beta, and I think they've put together a great little thing. I just wish they were selling it for a lower price. I wonder how much of that is Blizzard, and how much of that is Activision. Like, did Blizzard envision this as a $40 game, but then Activision stepped in and said if they were going to sell discs in stores, it had to be $60? I have no idea. And we may never know!

But it's fun. I'll probably play some more of that beta before it ends.

Anything else?

Well, Uncharted 4 is out tomorrow, as I mentioned! I'll play that, and probably write something. I still want to play Ratchet and Clank too. But there hasn't been anything else I've played, so that's it! Thank you once again for reading my rambling messes that I call blogs. I hope you have a swell day!